As a historian, when I think of charters, the first things I think of are royal charters. The first result when you Google charter, on the other hand, is Charter Telecommunications Company because of course. But as members of the new Praxis Fellowship cohort, my fellow fellows and I tried to chart (I’m sorry) a very…. Continue reading “Crafting Our Charter – Praxis Program 2017-2018”.

My name is Spyros Simotas and I am a PhD candidate at the French Department at UVa. This year, I am also a Praxis fellow at the Scholars’ Lab. In this first blog post I would like to briefly introduce myself honoring Brandon’s ice-breakers. Brandon always comes to our meetings with an ice-breaker. Here are…. Continue reading “Hello World!”.

On Tuesday, March 20th the Praxis 2016-2017 Cohort was awarded first place for their project “Dash-Amerikan: Keeping up with Kardashian Media Ecologies” at the 2017 Huskey Research Exhibition, hosted by the University of Virgina Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. They will be presenting their findings again in early May. Until then, here is the abstract of…. Continue reading “Congratulations to the Praxis 2016-2017 Cohort”.

This week, the Praxis cohort heard from Brandon Butler, UVA’s Director of Information Policy, who gave a fascinating talk on the evolution of copyright law and the meaning of intellectual property. He covered the U.S. Constitution’s intellectual property clause, the rolling boundaries of public domain, and the shift from monetary value to cultural value as…. Continue reading “Fair Use, DH, and the Kardashians”.

What is topic modeling? Topic modeling is type of statistical model that sorts through a large corpus of writing through language processing algorithms with the purpose of discovering the broad topics under discussion by grouping together words frequently used in tandem. This method has been used in the past by scholars working on distant reading,…. Continue reading “Topic Modeling Twitter”.

“When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.” — Andy Warhol “In the future, everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” is without a doubt Andy Warhol’s most famous quote. Eerily predictive of the twenty-first century’s stars who are famous for “being famous,” this quote encapsulates…. Continue reading “Why Study Popular Culture? Why Study the Kardashians?”.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to read the dialogue that passes between members of the Kardashian family on Keeping Up with the Kardashians? To have those seemingly intimate conversations and confessions in the form of a literary production that is open to analysis, interpretation, and text mining? Me neither. Not until…. Continue reading “Reading the Kardashians”.

Given our subject matter for the 2016-17 Praxis cohort, we recognized early on that we would be grappling with a very different sort of archive than we’ve grown accustomed to as humanists. Instead of the stacks, journal databases, manuscripts, and historical objects, we’d have to take a serious look at Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, and…. Continue reading “Working with an Archive of the ‘Now’”.

We started this semester thinking about time and the ways time is structured, pathologized, and altered. And when it came to finding an access point for these questions, a project, if you will, we found it in an unlikely source: Initially, as serious grad students, we were a bit resistant/hesitant to stake our entire…. Continue reading “Time, Twitter, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians”.

One of the recurrent issues I noticed when our Praxis cohort began discussing the meaning of the digital humanities was the field’s need to justify its existence. At the beginning of the semester, we read articles about digital humanities as a “tactical term” and the kind of institutional, financial affiliations necessary to sustain DH labs…. Continue reading “Why not build another digital humanities tool?”.